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The European Patent Office (EPO) has opened up its free translation service for patent documents to enable access for six more languages.

Bulgarian, Czech, Icelandic, Romanian, Slovak and Slovenian are now all available on the Patent Translate service, which was set up to provide multilingual access to patent documents to help businesses with their research.

EPO President Benoît Battistelli said they were “very pleased to create greater access.”

"We are very pleased to offer users in this new group of countries better access to patent documents from all over the world, while making information about their inventions readily available in English to a very large number of users. This contributes to patent quality and helps to strengthen the competitiveness of European enterprises."

The service, launched in 2012, now has 21 languages accessible with Japanese and Chinese being recent additions. It is accessible on the EPO's free online patent database, Espacenet.

There are plans to expand to 28 European languages and other major Asian languages by the end of next year.